Effective Organisation Guidelines
Author: Eric Thompson
Eric Thompson introduces three guidelines that will help you to make your organisation an effective organisation.
“Why bother?” you may well ask. Well, organisational effectiveness is about choosing to do the right things, and any organisation that consistently strives to focus on what is right for their customer and by implication eliminates things that are not necessary, will tend to prosper at the expense of those organisations that do not. The effective organisation brings to its customers the prizes of improved quality of delivery and value for money.
If I ask you the question, “Do you belong to an effective organisation?” you may be tempted to answer positively and point to the good things that the organisation has done as justification. If I ask the question slightly differently, “Do you think that your organisation could become more effective” then again most of you, I suspect, would come up with a positive answer. It doesn’t matter how you are performing now, it is always possible to improve. In recognition of that, many of the most effective organisations have embraced continuous improvement as one of their underpinning values.
You may already be open to the idea that organisational effectiveness is a key factor for any organisation that seeks to deliver increased value and improved services to their customers. You may already acknowledge that it is not a one time process, that you will have to keep working at it, and that indeed continuous improvement is essential if you are to become and remain an effective organisation. The question is what you should do about it. In this article I am going to introduce some simple “effective organisation guidelines” that will enable you to focus on making your organisation an effective organisation. First of all though, let us discuss what it is that your effective organisation is going to deliver.
You can only judge the effectiveness of an organisation if you know what it is supposed to be doing in the first place. Every part of an organisation must have a distinct role to play in providing their specific product or service to their customers, whether those customers are external to the organisation or in another part of the same organisation. If there is any doubt about the role of the whole or of part of your organisation then that is where the journey needs to start. Each part of an organisation needs to have a clear, distinct and essential role. Dealing with organisational effectiveness by starting in an internal department and working to make it
“Make sure that each individual can contribute as much as they are able.”
more effective is not the answer. You may indeed make that department more efficient but to answer the effectiveness question you need to take a wider perspective. You need to be clear about why that department is there, what the service is that you want it to deliver, and why that department is necessary. The issue is best summarised in a quote attributed to the American business guru Peter F Drucker “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.”
If you believe that each bit of your organisation has a clear, distinct and essential role, then you can usefully consider how to tackle organisational effectiveness. There are three simple effective organisation guidelines to consider. They deal with the people, the systems and ideas. Let’s examine each in turn.
Guideline number one relates to the people in the organisation and can be stated simply. “Make sure that each individual can contribute as much as they are able.” There are many facets of employee effectiveness dealing, for example, with aspects of employee capability through training, development, coaching and mentorship but remembering also to think about the willingness of the employee to contribute by considering employee motivation. The employee needs to be developed both for the short term and the long term and with a number of horizons in mind. Each employee will have a specific technical contribution to make. Whether they are administrator or actuary, secretary or solicitor they need to be good at what they do. Each individual is also part of a team and will have a team role to perform. They need to understand how to use their personal team skills to make the team work better. Finally, the team works within an organisation with a clear purpose and to deliver a specific service. Each individual needs to be equipped with skills which help them to identify and address problems and make improvements to that delivery as they go about their daily work.
“Make sure that the systems of work are of high quality, focus on the delivery of the service and are set in a context of continuous improvement.”Our second guideline relates to the systems of work that you have in place to guide how the work is done. Business process improvement is the key. “Make sure that the systems of work are of high quality, focus on the delivery of the service and are set in a context of continuous improvement.” You can split the systems of work into two. Those that directly define the delivery of the service to the customer and those that support indirectly but build the excellence of the delivery. The first set are of course determined by the products and services that you deliver and the demands of your customers. Into the second category come all of those systems that motivate and support the people that will deliver your services. Organisational design, performance management, communications, teamwork development and leadership are all examples of work systems which directly affect the people in the organisation and it is the combination of those systems which develop the culture in which employees thrive and deliver or get swamped and subside.
All of this has of course to be set in an environment of continuous improvement. From Drucker again.” Follow effective action with quiet reflection. From the quiet reflection will come even more effective action.” Continuous improvement is not about continuously debating what changes to make and never reaching a definitive conclusion. It is about deciding on an improvement, making the change, measuring the impact, taking stock and then repeating the process over and over again. Taking stock is important because our organisations are not isolated from the rest of the world. Things change. New legislation and regulations come our way. Our customers change their perception of what they want. We need to respond.
“Use external sources to develop your improvement process and tools and to get information and ideas about what further improvement may be possible.”
Our third guide line relates to ideas for improvement. Your organisation is not likely to be different from many other organisations. You will have your own ideas as to how organisational effectiveness can be improved, and if you can harness them, so will many of the people in the organisation. It is those home spun ideas that are owned and acted on by the organisation itself that set the improvement chain into motion. There is a limit however to what can be achieved entirely from internal resources and certainly a limit to the rate of progress if that approach has to be taken. From external sources you can access well developed improvement methods, tool kits that help your people to address the improvement issues and experience of working in a continuous improvement environment that can be used to coach and develop your own people to accelerate their uptake of the approach. Ultimately it is likely that you will want to benchmark the performance of your organisation against the performance of similar organisations, so that you can measure how you are progressing in improvement terms and find ways of tackling issues that you and your team had not thought of. So our third guideline is “Use external resources to develop your improvement process and tools and to get information and ideas about what further improvement may be possible.”
These effective organisation guidelines are not an exact recipe which can be repeated time after time, irrespective of the nature of the organisation. If however you use the guidelines to stimulate your thinking about your own organisation and use them to prompt appropriate courses of action, you may find that building an effective organisation is not as elusive as you had feared.